Pulling together and synthesising the main insights from recent popular business and social science books (as well as first-hand experience from teaching and consulting), the presentation describes the main challenges of operating in a global post-COVID environment, and how best to address these with open, agile and uncertainty-embracing mindset.

Key takeaways will include:

• teach and empower practitioners to think and act like open-minded curious foxes
• to learn and embrace a ‘wicked problems’ mindset: not everything is easily measured and can be managed through ‘standard operating procedures’
• our abundance of data, processing tools, frameworks etc. can create a false sense of control: some critical aspects of communication are outside the realm of data scientists, and in the social sciences, control is rarely possible
• we need to learn to be confident with a (potential) lack of control, and operate less in a talking, organisation-first mindset, and more in a listening, stakeholder-management mindset